1. The Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to the field of computer font technology. In particular, the present invention relates to methods, systems and computer program products for allowing characters of fonts that are not standard to an operating system of a computer to be displayed and/or otherwise used by the operating system of the computer.
2. Relevant Technology
Authors are in the business of conveying a message through the skillful and artistic use of characters often referred to as “text”. In addition to the message read from the text, authors are often also concerned with the impression made by the visual appearance of the text. For example, a skilled author would not draft a technical document using the font style of a child's picture book as doing so would diminish the seriousness and professionalism of the work.
Recently, network sites, such as Internet web sites, have been made available as a new authoring medium. For example, an author using an authoring program loaded on a computer can write an electronic document, such as a web page. The authoring program may contain a number of unique or non-standard fonts that allow the author to create the electronic document so as to have a unique or desired appearance. In general, a font is simply a set of characters having a predefined typeface or configuration. Once created, the electronic document is stored on a server. A reader can then request and download the electronic document for display on the reader's computer.
Authors of conventional printed material can generally feel assured that, unless there is some damage to the printed material, the printed material will appear to the reader precisely as it was generated by the author. In contrast, electronic documents requested by a reader are displayed on the reader's computer using only the fonts that are currently loaded on the reader's computer. Accordingly, if the reader's computer does not contain the same fonts that were used by the author in creating the electronic document, the electronic document is displayed on the reader's computer in a form different than that originally created by the author. Generally, the operating system of the reader's computer replaces the unknown fonts with known fonts when displaying the electronic document.
Several attempts have been made to ensure that electronic documents made with non-standard fonts are displayed on a reader's computer in the same form, i.e., same font(s), as created by the author. One commonly used method is to represent the text as images in a digital format, such as bitmaps or jpeg files. These digital images, however, cannot be resized without a loss of quality. For example, if a digital picture of a text character is enlarged, the resolution of the text character is also enlarged, thereby degrading the visual appearance of the character both on the screen and in print.
Furthermore, characters represented as image files are typically much larger than characters represented by fonts. Accordingly, using an image file increases the size of the electronic document, thereby increasing its download time. In addition, image files take longer to display on a screen. Thus, operations such as scrolling that require an image to be frequently rendered are slowed down and otherwise degraded. Finally, characters represented as image files cannot be stylized. For example, such characters cannot be italicized.
In another attempted solution, a first computer includes a document builder that receives input text so that the input text may be represented in the document. The input text is originally defined using pre-defined font descriptions. The document builder then creates a new font description (hereinafter called a “proprietary vector font description”) for the input text with the aid of a character shape recorder. The proprietary vector font description is then placed in the document. The first computer system then delivers the document to a second computer system.
The second computer system includes a character shape player which is uniquely configured to interpret the proprietary vector font descriptions included in the document. If the second computer system does not already have the character shape player, the character shape player may be downloaded with the document.
Although this latter solution improves upon the prior state of the art, the proprietary vector font description is not standard to a reader's operating system. Accordingly, this solution requires the use of the character shape player by every reader's computer that is to display an electronic document containing the proprietary vector font. Many applications may not be configured to access the services of the character shape player. Accordingly, this solution does not allow the fonts represented by the proprietary vector font description to be freely copied and pasted into or otherwise used, such as by printing, by other applications that do not access the services of the character shape player. In addition, even if an application had access to the object player mechanism, the fonts cannot be rendered as efficiently as they could if the operating system itself was capable of interpreting the fonts. Accordingly, operations such as scrolling of the fonts is sluggish.
Therefore, what are desired are methods, systems, and computer program products for allowing characters of fonts that are not standard to an operating system of a reader's computer to be conveniently used by the operating system to facilitate viewing, copying, pasting, printing, and/or editing of the characters in different applications.